Stories for Europe Kick-Off

Stories for Europe is an emerging initiative and experiment promoting engaging European narratives that express European values, identity, and, above all, the future of Europe. It is an effort that counter-balances the fear-driven and negative narratives that populist movements have recently spread. Christine Kunzmann and Andreas Schmidt have contributed to the kick-off event at Aachen. The inspiring event has shown, similar to professional identity transformation, that we need spaces for developing identity narratives that reach beyond rational arguments and address emotional aspects, such as uncertainty. One open space session was particularly targetted towards ways of addressing that uncertainty that is shaping the current discourse about the future of Europe.

The participants agreed on continuing with the experiment in a community-driven way. A next meeting is planned for spring 2018.